1) Field of the Invention
The automatic comparison of data in sequences is a commonly encountered task in computer science, natural science and engineering problems. Data sequences in the context of the present invention correspond to sets of consecutive objects which can be tested for equality or, more generally, for similarity or dissimilarity.
2) Description of the Related Art
Typical examples of data sequences are sequences of symbols, images, text (e.g. ASCII characters), genetic data, proteins, bytes, binary data or abstract tokens.
Two data sequences containing any of these kinds of objects can be compared with each other, so that a similarity (or dissimilarity) value between both can be computed. In extension of this idea, more than two data sequences can be compared with each other, so that a matrix comprising pairwise similarity values is obtained.